2021 field season has come to an end
We’ve collected all of our planned summer data and winter is here. That means that our 2021 field season is officially over! While we are excited to dive into analyzing the data and seeing the results, we are sad to see the season end. This season was one of massive growth for our organization. We added new projects, formed new relationships and collaborations, and expanded our team. This year we also explored more of our study area, seeing parts of the rangeland that we had never seen before.
If you read last month’s blog, you’ll know that we started studying soil health and soil carbon. Our main collaborator in this effort is the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). It was great to work with this team and start this new project. They taught us about soil health and got our wheels spinning about what changes we might expect across our Three Creeks rangelands with implementation of the new grazing plan. We are very excited to continue working with the NRCS on this project and see what our data tells us.
One of the highlights of the field season was exploring more of Rich County, Utah. If you’ve ever been to this part of the country, you probably drove by miles and miles of sagebrush and cows. That’s what we did for years, even when we left the pavement. But this year, we took a few more dirt roads and left the sagebrush, into the forest. We always wondered where the local lumber mill was getting all of its wood and where all of the logging trucks were coming from, and we finally found it. Above all the sagebrush is a forest so thick that you can hardly see 50 yards in front of you. And redrock. Yes, redrock. This area is also known for its caves, including some ice caves that we explored. Don’t tell anybody else, but Rich County is such a unique and beautiful place.
This year was also exciting for our team because we added more crew members, and for the first time we had full-time seasonal crew members. This meant we spent all day, every together. At first, we were a little nervous, but we hired an incredible crew this year. They worked hard every day to make sure the work got done AND left plenty of time for jokes and fun. They made being out in the field, in the heat with the bugs, much more enjoyable! We also added a couple of non-human crew members to the team this season, including Karl the crawdad and a few nosy supervisors.
The new supervisors were slight overbearing and really smelly.
Karl the crawdad hard at working, putting out flags.
As if we didn’t get enough field work this summer, we even managed to sneak back up to Rich County at the beginning of December to get a few things done before the snow came. We would normally never imagine being there this late in the year, but the nice weather let us sneak up there one last time for the year. It was exciting to see our sites just one last time before they were covered in a blanket of snow, and it was very insightful to see this area during a different season.
As of this week, our sites are buried in snow and we won’t be returning to Rich County until next spring. It’s always a bittersweet moment - we want to be working outside in nature, but we are anxious to sit down with all of the data from the year and start to analyze it. We’ll miss the sounds and sights of our summer office, but we are already planning for our 2022 field season! Check out our recently posted summer field crew positions! Hope you join us in the field next year!